Ranma and Ranko: Half and Half
by Nachoman1
Summary: Ranma visited Jusenkyo at a much younger age, and the curse came with a soul attached to it. This is the story of the twins Ranma and Ranko, who met at age eight and walk inside the same shoes.


**Literature type: **fan-made fiction

**Literary format: **short novel (expected)

**Narration format:** third-person based, by-character omniscient narration

**Title: ****Ranma and Ranko, Half and Half**

**Literary source (for fan-made fiction): **Ranma 1/2 (Anime)

**Disclaimer:** The author of this literary piece does not own the original story "Ranma 1/2", its characters or its settings; those are intellectual property of Rumiko Takahashi and her publishers. This literary piece is written for entertainment purposes only, and the author makes no profit from it.

The author of this piece might make cameos from other series. The same applies there.

**Prologue:**

Genma stopped his hike on the top of a hill, and took a good look at the valley extending before him. The valley's floor was full of small ponds barely separated from each other, with bamboo sticks sticking out of them every few meters. The morning dew on the valley gave it a feeling of enormity, especially as he could see pools and more pools growing fainter until he could not discern any further.

He looked back, and observed aloft as his waste of a son was still struggling to catch up with him.

'What a Nancy boy! No muscles were damaged!' he thought, as he saw how the boy made such meticulous steps. As if carrying boulders across a bed of hot coals had been enough to injure a son of mine!' He thought. 'Had I tried to do it, I'm sure I would not have been scratched. At least he stopped whining about Nodoka after the Neko-Ken training, for a fat load of good that training did!'

An odd feeling of ill made him turn in alarm. Yet the moment he turned, he couldn't see a thing that could have given him such a fright. He did note that a whirlwind seemed to have formed in the valley, and was quickly clearing away the dew.

'Not so endless I guess.' He thought, as he could now see the other rim of the valley, about three kilometers from were he stood. He also made a note on a house on the opposite end of the valley and an amount of paths zigzagging through the mass of pools. None followed the straight line between him and the hut, he noted with satisfaction.

"Daddy, please not so fast!" Ranma said pleadingly, with his eyes puffy with unshed tears. The boy was still a few meters behind him.

Genma looked down on his son, frowning. 'How will I sponsor my retirement using this boy, if the boy can't even live to the kind of training me and Tendo endured from the Master?'

It's curious how Genma could forget that he had been picked up by the old Master when he and Tendo were both nineteen, and both where already accomplished martial artists.

"Move it, boy!" He said, while he began moving toward the valley. "I'm making breakfast by that hut…" – He pointed at it. – "…And you won't get any if you are wet after crossing the valley!" He then set off at a good pace, giving Ranma the unspoken instruction to follow on his footsteps.

A couple of minutes later, he was hopping on the bamboo poles, leading his son through the most direct line to the hut. His scowl deepened every time he turned around and saw that his son wasn't on the poles, but ratter walking on these edges that kept the springs separated.

'The boy isn't getting breakfast today.' He growled, as he saw the boy nearly fall on the water after stepping on a rock covered with moss. His frown brightened a bit as he saw the boy clinging to another rock with hands and feet, barely an inch from touching the water; all for the rock to suddenly shift and fall with him.

Genma turned away in disgust and jumped again. Right as he landed, the tip of his bamboo pole chose to give way, leaving him completely flatfooted to fall on the pool below.

Mayor pain assaulted his body for a second, which only ended as he felt his clothes explode from his body. Regaining his bearings, he planted his feet on the bottom of the pool and jumped toward the pole he had intended on reaching before falling. He felt very surprised when he barely cleared half of the height and fell on the path separating 'his' pool from the next.

'Did I get that badly waterlogged?' He wondered. 'I guess my backpack might have filled with water. I hate a wet bedroll!' He thought, as he looked down, only to find his body about a thousand times chubbier than he would have ever admitted being. He looked at his arms to find them unrecognizably blubbery. He tried finding his feet, and nearly fell over on just how far forward he had to lean.

He got the idea after a few seconds. 'I'm as fat as a sumo champion!'

He fainted.

A stream of hot water made him snap awake. From the floor, he looked bewildered at a somewhat portly fellow, who loomed over him wearing a green Chinese Army Uniform, and holding an upended and steaming wok. His face only showed boredom.

Still from the floor, Genma began inspecting himself again. He lifted his hands and saw them normal. He lifted his head, and looking down he saw nothing wrong (other than his clothes being tatters). He jumped up and began whooping up, thinking that it had been a dream, until the Chinese fellow tapped him on the shoulder.

The portly fellow began speaking. Genma understood what the fellow said first as a question in Mandarin. On lack of response, the fellow made a question in Cantonese. Upon no response, the fellow kept switching languages and making questions, now without waiting for Genma to try to answer. Genma understood after a few more tries from the fellow: 'this guy is trying to see what language I speak!'

"I speak Japanese!" Genma said, interrupting him.

"That is most fortunate to know, as I speak that language as well." the fellow replied, in Japanese. "Seems fitting: you fell into the spring of the very fat Japanese wrestler, were one such drowned around three hundred years ago. Now, whenever somebody falls in the spring, his or her body becomes as fat as that wrestler's, and instantly learns the rules of Japanese Wrestling."

Genma thought that the fellow must have been kidding.

"Come on, that couldn't have been real!" Genma retorted on a condescending manner.

The fellow just rolled his eyes at Genma's tone.

"Whatever you say; it wasn't real. Now, isn't that your backpack?" He pointed over Genma's shoulder.

Genma turned and spotted his backpack barely floating in the middle of one of the many pools. He uttered a quick thanks to the fellow and dived for the sack: the faster he could retrieve the pack, the less damage the training grounds' map would receive.

He jumped into the pool and picked up his pack, but was once again greeted by the sight of his arms being as thick as hams.

Bewildered, he turned toward the Chinese fellow. The fellow cupped his hands around his mouth, and bellowed to Genma: "Follow me, and try not falling into other springs: the curse could become compounded!" Then he picked up his wok from the floor, turned heels, and began walking away.

Genma immediately began following. He felt the guy's gait to be infuriatingly slow, although he briefly admitted that his own impatience might be related to finding out that his backpack wasn't only completely soaked, but also its straps had snapped.

The guy eventually made it out of the pools, and into the hut. Genma followed him inside, and saw a redheaded girl of about seven or eight sleeping fitfully and looking feverish on the man's bed. Genma only spared her a glimpse before continuing with the guy.

'That girl doesn't seem like she will live much longer. Really, that's a show that they are the weaker sex;' he thought, as he sat with the guy on a table. The bloke seemed to have had some tea going, as he began serving a couple of cups as soon as both had sat.

"So, it is really simple," the guy said. "You will be a Sumo whenever you are splashed with cold water, and hot water will turn you back to your normal state."

"But you brought me here because you know the cure, right?" Genma said, putting some threat into his voice.

The bloke shrugged at the menace. "If there is one, Jusenkyo should provide it in your next visit. That is, if it finds you have learned from your curse.

"I'm not sure about the child, though," he said, as he waved with his cup at the girl. "Jusenkyo called me to rush and pull this one outside of the waters of the spring of the Drowned Girl. A girl died there fifteen hundred years ago, and I guess you can guess the rest."

He eyed Genma with a meaningful look, and Genma only took a few seconds to nod. Then, it was like a light bulb had gone off in Genma's mind, as he added two and two.

He jumped from his place and slammed his hands on the table.

"So that girl is my son!" He billowed at the bloke, panicky. 'A girl won't fill the conditions of the pledge with Tendo, and definitely not the contract with Nodoka!'

The fellow sipped his tea before looking up to Genma's blotted face. "Could you sit down, please, and let me continue explaining?"

Genma did so almost immediately.

"So your son got a female body, just like you got a fat body. This time is different, though," the fellow said, shrugging. "Sometimes Jusenkyo doesn't affect the body half as much as it does the mind. You should have only gotten the rules of Sumo, but Jusenkyo sometimes, for special subjects or for special springs, might imprint them with extensive or full memories of the past life of whoever drowned on the pool. And even less frequently, Jusenkyo might bless somebody with the soul of somebody who previously drowned there. It's not always a blessing for the one who receives the new soul, but it definitely is a blessing for the soul to be free from its long imprisonment on the pool."

The bloke concluded by simply resuming sipping his tea.

Genma was in turmoil. After a few minutes, though, one question surfaced with enough strength.

"Who or what is Jusenkyo other than a valley?"

"Good you ask." The fellow said. "Jusenkyo is how my family has always called the spirit or conjunction of spirits that reign over this valley. It attracts people who either deserve a curse or need a blessing, and guide them so they fall in the right pool. Sometimes it guides people or creatures so they drown on blank pools, though."

The fellow stopped speaking to let Genma think.

Genma was so overloaded that he could not function. He kept going over ways to continue his plans with Soun, and avert disaster with Nodoka.

After some thinking, he decided to travel far and wide until he could cure Ranma and himself. He had promised Nodoka to temporarily return home next year, by the child's eight birthday, yet he would need to break his word; he would travel around China and into Tibet and India, as long and far as it took to get cures.

He felt thankful the child had stopped making comments about missing Nodoka after the Neko-ken. Hopefully he had forgotten about her, and that was for the best anyway, as far as he was concerned. Soun's pact, on the other hand, shouldn't present any issues as far as Ranma could still be turned back to male.

Galvanizing on his decision, he served himself some more tea, stood up, walked over to the fitful girl, removed the covers and threw the tea on her. The child barely changed, other than the hair turning black; otherwise, the child's condition changed from fitfully asleep to awake and bewildered.

Genma towered over his son, hiding any concern he felt. He addressed him.

"Stand up, boy! I don't want to see you looking like some weak little girl!"

Genma would have added some more, but he was introduced to a world of pain as the boy suddenly flew from the bed and into his face, legs first, ricocheted off his face and onto the wall, made a perfect controlled bounce off the wall, once again made his feet collide with Genma's face and jumped straight up from Genma's face to hang from one of the rafters above. Genma landed straight as a board, dazed from the combo's effect and the combo itself, which had started with a rising kick that he had never seen Ranma using.

The child landed hard on his chest and glowered at him with hands on hips.

"Here's a strong little girl for you, Daddy!"

'He thinks he's a girl!' Genma thought, before falling unconscious. He never heard as Ranma said with some fright "I didn't say that!"

**Okay, here's the good work done around that crappy piece I posted fairly recently. This has been sitting around in my back burner for quite a while, and only now I accept how it works. I still say it needs something more.**

**Next chapter is still missing a couple of scenes. I grumble: I haven't been able to add more to it in months!**


End file.
